Short Summary
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The main feature of the game is that spells aren’t infinite. The Tiny Wizard has no visible level and gains no XP, instead of this the spells have. Crafting the same spell again will raise this spell power. You are collecting spell recipes that describe ingredients and how to gather them right. Used spells can be recharged with power crystals (e.g. on level start).
The storyline is moving forward by giving you quests to complete. There will be NPCs in a game that will appear on a location. Need to say here that all world is procedurally generated, so every level start is not like previous. You will not find NPC second time, instead found another NPC with another quest. The random will have a prediction to control a story canvas, but my idea is to make it various as possible.
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E.g of a spellcraft. So you have your first recipe. There is a description - to cook this spell you need to put two snakes and five blue mushrooms into a cauldron with boiling mana.
You need to find an instruction - how to find blue mushrooms and snakes? And here's an NPC comes to help, giving a quest “Bring me a water from ten evil drops, and I’ll tell you how to find mushrooms” and “I’ve dropped my staff into this cave, help me to find it. But beware, there is a lot of snakes in that caves”.
There are no levels in the game but there are locations. So you will need to visit one location several times, searching for a quest boss or trying to collect ingredients. Every time this location will look different and will contain different enemies and ingredients. The quests will teach you what you will need to do to un-reveal all secrets of the location and collect all recipes.
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What game will be on the release
- A free game that will be available in mobile stores at the end of the first development stage:
- At least five locations of the Dark Forest, each with additional art, enemies, and bosses
- The storyline that involves you into the game
- Dozens of enemies with different behaviors
- Bosses with different tactics
- A spellbook to hold pages that you will find in the game. A lot of awesome spells to find
- Secret caves, secret rooms
- Daily challenges
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Roadmap
First development stage:
- Playable prototype with random level, monsters, and rooms generation (done)
- Pre-alpha with UI, inventory, working spellcraft system, and battle system (work in progress)
- NPC’s and a Quest system
- Alpha with working game loop and a balance.
- List of enemies
- List of Bosses
- Storyline embedded into the quest system linked to levels and bosses.
- Beta release with music, sfx, intro.
- Release candidate. Act I is done with additional monsters, spells, art.
- Release at Google Play
- Release on AppStore
Second development stage:
- PC version that will have slightly different speed and challenge, with the corresponding controls and UI
- Release on Steam
Third development stage:
- Act II. New environment. New storyline, NPCs, monsters, spells, ingredients.
Work In Progress
https://alvsgl.itch.io/dark-forest-pre-alpha(Warning! It's just a playable prototype, no core game loop.)
Update #1 Playable prototype. Looks like fun even without fightback to monsters. The level is generated based on numeral seed.
Update #2 Made a spell system and first battle spell. Now is the time to work on spellcraft UI.
Update #3 Working on NPCs
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Update #4 Working on UI and Live Ingredients behavior